Where technology meets something or other

Book Review: Post this Book

Sometimes there is such a thing as too many memes and kitten gifs. David Sinden and Nikalas Catlow breathe fresh air into social media feeds with #Post This Book (Sourcebooks, $9.99, complete with built-in hashtag). This sweet inspirational book is suitable for tweens, teens, and even college students. It offers 150+ pages of ideas for tweeting, tumbling, facebooking, vine filming, and instagramming.

It’s not a book you read. Each page offers one or two ideas along with quick descriptions. You turn pages, you get inspired, you go out and express yourself using those ideas. Everything is simple, but well tweaked to connect with an audience and inspire a conversation.

With kids and social media, there’s always tension between privacy and free expression, appropriateness and creativity. I’m pleased to say that in the time I spent flicking through pages in this book and showing examples to my kids, that I didn’t find anything objectionable or problematic.

The ideas in this book allow kids involve themselves in public fora (using anonymous nicks and handles, of course, because, you know, reality). At the same time they’re exploring their imaginations, they’re not crossing inappropriate lines that are so prevalent on Tumblr and beyond.

This book’s projects offer positive ways to test the waters of social media. Whether brainstorming how to “zombify something unlikely”, videoing time lapsed “tidying up”, or creating “a tabletop obstacle course”, all the projects I read through were inspirational and fun.

#Post This Book goes on sale on July 1st from Sourcebooks. It’s a perfect “gift” book — for just 10 bucks, you can probably buy a small tin of colored pencils or markers to pair with it without breaking the bank.

I was given early access to the manuscript for this review courtesy of NetGalley and Sourcebooks.